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U of Wyoming Fingerprinting All P2P Traffic
mk2mk2 writes "News.com has an article on how they're preparing to shut down P2P sharing of copyrighted content: 'For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song or "Friends" episode.'" It's scary until one realizes that most P2P traffic isn't encrypted, like back when everyone still used telnet.
There is one small point you are overlooking here. They (the University of Wyoming) own the network they are snooping...you don't. That is what makes the difference between it being okay for them to do it and not okay for you to do it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
All they need is software that emulates kazza or other P2P software and attempts to make connections to user's computers. Unless you do filesharing with people you trust, there is no way you can hide what kind of traffic is being sent. On the client side, the person not sharing files, I guess you could use encryption, but then you know what that will lead to in universities? A ban on high-bandwidth encrypted connections. As long as it's a problem I think the technology to detect P2P will keep up with the P2P software itself.
Besides, if I went to that university, I wouldn't want my research slowed down because some freshmen was trying to download Friends episodes.
If administrators can't distinguish "good" traffic from "bad" traffic, they will have no choice but to simply remove any access at all to the Internet from the problem subnets, namely dorms.
So, encrypt the traffic. Make it so that nobody can tell what's inside the stream. That's dandy. But if P2P usage makes it such that researchers can't get the resources or bandwidth do actually do their work or are significantly impacted (the argument of whether researchers are doing anything more than reading Slashdot or Dilbert is for a separate post), even if the traffic isn't recognized as P2P per se, you can bet that this will be the next step.
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
Well, they still can't stamp out the CD burner and the "analog hole". Sales of CD-Rs should pick up after measures that serious are put into place, and nothing beats the bandwidth of handing your buddy a spindle of CD-Rs. Also, I don't know much about encryption, but couldn't someone and their friends agree on an arbitrarily huge key in person and trade their little hearts out?
-insert a witty something-
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's network.
Yes there is. Just like there is if you're living in someone else's house, aka, an apartment. At my school students have to pay for their internet access. This makes the school an ISP. As a business providing a service and can't just "do whatever they want".
Do you own your phonelines? Is it okay with you if the phone company records every conversation you make to check for illegal activities? They are their phone lines you know, you have no easonable expectation of privacy using them. Too bad, I guess you should have encrypted all your phone calls.
One of these days, an ISP or school will get sued for pulling this shit. Network traffic can contain some very personal information. AFAIK I have never signed anything that would let my isp monitor ALL my traffic continuously. Most service contracts suggest that the may be some montioring to ensure network performance, but it would be pretty damn easy to prove that this was not what they we doing if they were continuously monitoring my traffic for an extended period of time.
Of course, the real solution is to encrypt your traffic. Then you get to have your ISP prosecued for a serious crime (at least much more serious than copyright violation) if they do manage to break the encryption.
Life is too short to proofread.
It's different if they just want to conserve some bandwidth, but if they are just trying to stop the distribution of copyrighted works, then that sounds like an impossible task. Who owns the copyright on "Redhead Sticking a Cucumber up her Ass" ?
--sex
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